Alan Stewart’s UK and Ireland family history news

Northern Ireland BMD records to go online

It seems the civil registration records for Northern Ireland are going online.

According to Claire Santry’s blog Irish Genealogy News, ‘historic’ birth, marriage and death records for Northern Ireland are to be digitised and made available online by 2013.

Civil registration began in Ireland in 1845 for non-Roman Catholic marriages and in 1864 for births, deaths and Catholic marriages. Claire has been told that the records will be available online from:

1864-1913 births;

1845-1938 marriages;

1864-1963 deaths.

The cut-off dates are very similar to those for viewing digitised images of Scottish records on the ScotlandsPeople website. By 2013, these will be 1855-1912 for births, 1855-1937 for marriages and 1855-1962 for deaths.

So, good for Northern Ireland! Let’s hope the Irish Republic follows suit (actually, it digitised its civil registration records some time ago, but hasn’t made them available online).

Perhaps the British Government will be shamed into getting a move on with its digitisation programme for English and Welsh civil registration records. Noticeably, it’s the devolved governments of Scotland and Northern Ireland that have taken the initiative here. Why the English and Welsh record digitisation (has that been completed yet?), indexing and availability online can’t be outsourced to Find My Past, Ancestry or The Genealogist, I can’t imagine. I would have thought that would appeal to David Cameron.

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Actually, the bmd’s for Northern Ireland are already online at familysearch.org. The images are not available, but the transcriptions are available for free, and have been for several months now. I was one of the thousands of volunteers who created an index for them to made available online. The LDS church microfilmed these years ago in Ireland, and have now made them available (with permission) to the public. To access them, go to http://www.familysearch.org, and on the home page go down to “Record Collections”. Choose United Kingdom & Ireland, and then go have fun looking for ancestors.

I presume you mean the Civil Registration Indexes 1845-1958 that are on FamilySearch. These are just indexes (and for Northern Ireland stop at the end of 1921), which are certainly very useful, but what’s being proposed here is the digitisation of the actual records themselves.

The site is poorly designed and then really only intended to make money, David Cameron must love it. The cost per page for a general search sounds low at 40p but as any serious researcher knows it is an enormous cost. The level of security in the password is overdone for the purpose and will result in many forgotten passwords.

It is not clear whether the £7 fee for a day in the office includes results or of the cost remains the same in addition to the entry fee.